The everyday impact of COVID-19 in Vietnam's highlands
The everyday impact of COVID-19 in Vietnam's highlands
WRITTEN BY SEB RUMSBY
6 April 2020
Binh has lived and worked in Sapa for the past two decades and watched it grow from a sleepy highland town, reached by a handful of western backpackers, into a booming, bustling and increasingly polluted tourist hotspot for Vietnam’s emerging middle class with disposable income. Each year the town has expanded as more and more hotels have been built further up and down the road, blocking out the ‘pristine’ views of earlier hotels.
Since the end of this Lunar New Year, however, business has ground to a sudden halt. Over 200 hotels (accounting for 10,000 rooms) and restaurants have been ordered to close, tourist travel forbidden and hundreds of employees furloughed without compensation or indication of when work will become available again.
Binh’s previously profitable shuttlebus business has yielded no income for the past two months, so when the government announced even stricter travel restrictions at the end of March, he hastily took his wife and two children out of Sapa and drove 400km downhill to his family home in Nam Dinh province. Binh is now living with his parents-in-law who can provide home-grown food and helping hands for childcare.
Vietnam’s Communist Party is also trying to use this time to revive a ‘wartime spirit’ of collective responsibility and unity, highlighting cases of individual generosity and self-sacrifice towards the cause.
Binh is one of many ethnic Kinh (Vietnamese majority) settlers of Vietnam’s highlands who were encouraged by government schemes to migrate from the lowlands from the late 1970s onwards, colonising areas which were inhabited by some of Vietnam’s many ethnic minorities.
This policy has been critiqued for encouraging wealthier lowlanders to seize land, exploit natural resources and reap the benefits of ‘ethnic tourism’ at the expense of ethnic minority locals on display. The majority of native highlanders do not have the finances or social connections to invest in high-profit ventures like hotels or coffee plantations, so they either farm or take on low-paid, temporary manual labour on construction sites, while a few lucky young people obtain government scholarships to study at university.
Recently, however, labourers and students have been taking the opposite route to Binh – back uphill to their home villages – although some left it too late and are stuck in the city with no public transport available.
In villages which have lost out on tourism revenue, people are returning to traditional subsistence livelihoods while practicing social distancing with neighbours and avoiding contact with outsiders as far as possible.
One important economic pathway to be disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic is across the Chinese border. As well as longstanding trade networks, in recent years many highlanders have been seasonally migrating to China for manual labour, often returning only once a year. This year, the border gates closed after the Lunar New Year holiday period, prompting a labour shortage in China and the prospect of higher wages for the few who are able to cross the border illegally without getting caught.
Anti-Chinese sentiment was already common in Vietnam, making it fertile soil for unfounded (but widely believed) rumours of China developing coronavirus as a biological weapon. In the early days people avoided buying Chinese goods due to a fear of contamination with the disease, but government attempts to prevent stockpiling of essential resources appears to have been successful.
Usually, one does not need to search far to find an undercurrent of quiet but strong criticism of, and everyday resistance to, the Vietnamese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule and endemic corruption.
However, this time things are different. Vietnam has been praised for its highly efficient containment of Coronavirus on limited resources, with only around 250 official cases of infection and no deaths, despite contracting its first case way back in January. Some uplands provinces are apparently yet to record a single case, although there are some concerns of underreporting of cases as in China.
A strategy of locating and quarantining infected people and their second- and third-hand contacts (as well as sealing off large residential areas) has been successful due to the state’s mobilisation of medical and military personnel combined with intrusive surveillance, pervasive network of informants and heavy fines for misbehaviour – the very things that are usually the object of critique.
Despite ongoing tensions in Vietnam’s highlands concerning ethnic inequality, religious discrimination and borderlands security, most people hold an overwhelmingly positive opinion towards recent state intervention; Binh is usually the first to complain about official corruption but describes the government’s handling of the crisis as ‘perfect’.
This looks to be a much-needed boost to the Communist Party’s legitimacy in the context of growing public discontent over increasing economic inequality and lack of democratic freedoms. Now, as people stuck at home follow international news about the devastation caused in Western democracies which are unable to control or prevent their citizens from breaching social distancing protocols, the case for a strong authoritarian state might make more sense. The Party is also trying to use this time to revive a ‘wartime spirit’ of collective responsibility and unity, highlighting cases of individual generosity and self-sacrifice towards the cause.
This does not mean there is nothing to worry about in Vietnam. Officially promoted remote education, instead of schools which have been closed for 2 months already, disadvantages ethnic minority students in remote areas with lack of internet connection.
While most people have a ‘safety net’ of sorts – to return to their home provinces and get on with farming – some who borrowed large sums to invest in Sapa have gone bankrupt and tourist sector employees do not know when work will resume.
Apart from masks and provisions for those in quarantine, highlanders have yet to see additional state welfare support; there is talk of a 1 million VND ($43)/month provision for those who have lost work, but no concrete policies so far. Binh estimates that even if the lockdown is lifted soon, domestic and international tourism will not recover for another two years due to a likely economic recession, both in Vietnam and globally. It remains to be seen how long public goodwill towards the government will last in the face of these longer term challenges.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Seb Rumsby is a Postdoctoral Impact Fellow at University of Warwick; his areas of interest include everyday politics, ethnicity and religion, international development and sociolinguistics in South East Asia and especially Vietnam. See here for more. Image credit: CC BY-NC 4.0/United Nations/Flickr.